Notes on Nursing | Page 2

a patient is faint, if he is
sick after taking food, if he has a bed-sore, it is generally the fault not
of the disease, but of the nursing.
[Sidenote: What nursing ought to do.]
I use the word nursing for want of a better. It has been limited to
signify little more than the administration of medicines and the
application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air,
light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet, and the proper selection and
administration of diet--all at the least expense of vital power to the
patient.
[Sidenote: Nursing the sick little understood.]
It has been said and written scores of times, that every woman makes a
good nurse. I believe, on the contrary, that the very elements of nursing
are all but unknown.
By this I do not mean that the nurse is always to blame. Bad sanitary,

bad architectural, and bad administrative arrangements often make it
impossible to nurse. But the art of nursing ought to include such
arrangements as alone make what I understand by nursing, possible.
The art of nursing, as now practised, seems to be expressly constituted
to unmake what God had made disease to be, viz., a reparative process.
[Sidenote: Nursing ought to assist the reparative process.]
To recur to the first objection. If we are asked, Is such or such a disease
a reparative process? Can such an illness be unaccompanied with
suffering? Will any care prevent such a patient from suffering this or
that?--I humbly say, I do not know. But when you have done away with
all that pain and suffering, which in patients are the symptoms not of
their disease, but of the absence of one or all of the above-mentioned
essentials to the success of Nature's reparative processes, we shall then
know what are the symptoms of and the sufferings inseparable from the
disease.
Another and the commonest exclamation which will be instantly made
is--Would you do nothing, then, in cholera, fever, &c.?--so deep-rooted
and universal is the conviction that to give medicine is to be doing
something, or rather everything; to give air, warmth, cleanliness, &c., is
to do nothing. The reply is, that in these and many other similar
diseases the exact value of particular remedies and modes of treatment
is by no means ascertained, while there is universal experience as to the
extreme importance of careful nursing in determining the issue of the
disease.
[Sidenote: Nursing the well.]
II. The very elements of what constitutes good nursing are as little
understood for the well as for the sick. The same laws of health or of
nursing, for they are in reality the same, obtain among the well as
among the sick. The breaking of them produces only a less violent
consequence among the former than among the latter,--and this
sometimes, not always.

It is constantly objected,--"But how can I obtain this medical
knowledge? I am not a doctor. I must leave this to doctors."
[Sidenote: Little understood.]
Oh, mothers of families! You who say this, do you know that one in
every seven infants in this civilized land of England perishes before it
is one year old? That, in London, two in every five die before they are
five years old? And, in the other great cities of England, nearly one out
of two?[1] "The life duration of tender babies" (as some Saturn, turned
analytical chemist, says) "is the most delicate test" of sanitary
conditions. Is all this premature suffering and death necessary? Or did
Nature intend mothers to be always accompanied by doctors? Or is it
better to learn the piano-forte than to learn the laws which subserve the
preservation of offspring?
Macaulay somewhere says, that it is extraordinary that, whereas the
laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies, far removed as they are
from us, are perfectly well understood, the laws of the human mind,
which are under our observation all day and every day, are no better
understood than they were two thousand years ago.
But how much more extraordinary is it that, whereas what we might
call the coxcombries of education--e.g., the elements of astronomy--are
now taught to every school-girl, neither mothers of families of any
class, nor school-mistresses of any class, nor nurses of children, nor
nurses of hospitals, are taught anything about those laws which God
has assigned to the relations of our bodies with the world in which He
has put them. In other words, the laws which make these bodies, into
which He has put our minds, healthy or unhealthy organs of those
minds, are all but unlearnt. Not but that these laws--the laws of life--are
in a certain measure understood, but not even mothers think it worth
their while to study them--to study how to give their children healthy
existences.